News Release

Nov. 19, 2014

Students place high at computer programming contest

By Alexandra Mortallaro, media relations assistant

Northwest Missouri State University computing students were top finishers this month at the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, which fosters creativity, teamwork and innovation in building new software programs.

Northwest students Diego Gutierrez Yepiz, a freshman computer science major from Monterrey, Mexico, and Northwest student Prem Kumar, a freshman computer science major from Dehli, India, placed first locally and seventh regionally at the Nov. 8 contest in Kansas City, Mo.

This year’s competition hosted 272 teams from 67 schools. Northwest’s team participated in the North Central North America region.

Prior to the contest, students are prepared with intense training and instruction in algorithms, programming and teamwork strategies. The contest consists of a series of questions related to real-life scenarios and topics such as modelling air traffic control, tracking robot movements and mapping race courses.

“It was a fun experience, though some important mistakes were made during the contest, which made us lose the pace we had,” Yepiz said. “I think I learned a lot from this experience and hopefully next year I will be able to attend world finals.”

The Association for Computing Machinery, with more than 100,000 members, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is the premiere global programming competition conducted by and for the world’s universities. Operating under the auspices of ACM and sponsored by IBM, the ICPC has grown during four decades to be a game-changing global competitive educational program that has raised the aspirations and performance of problem solvers in computing sciences and engineering.

For more information about the International Collegiate Programming Contest, visit www.acm.org.